"Separated?" she laughed. "Hell, I don't know if they were even married. I mean, maybe some long-haired freak in a tie-dyed shirt mumbled something and smoked hemp with them. But separated? From what?"
"Did your father know your mother, ah, fooled around?"
"Oh, yes."
"Did he object?"
"Maybe when he wasn't stoned. But she didn't care. She wasn't going to be somebody's chattel."
"Right on, sister," I said. "Your father fool around?"
"I don't think so. I think he was in love with Mistress Bong."
I could see why she had made up a story. Loosened, her rage was carnivorous.
"The man's name?" I said. "The one she came to Boston with."
"I don't know," Daryl said.
"Did you meet him?"
"Yes, but I don't know what his name was. I don't know anything about him. I hated him."
"Can you describe him?"
"No."
I nodded.
"When I was fifteen," Paul said, "my mother was bopping a guy named Stephen, with a ph. He was about six-one, slim, short hair, close-cropped beard, and mustache, always wore aviator glasses with pink lenses."
"So you remember, and I don't," Daryl said.
"I remember them all," Paul said. "Clearly."
"Well, I don't," Daryl said.
Neither of us said anything. Daryl looked out my window. The rain was just getting under way, a few spatters making isolated trickle paths down the pane.
"He was a black man," she said.
I waited.
"Not too big. I think he was only a little taller than my mother. He had a big afro."
"You remember his name?" I said.
She was quiet, watching the evolving rain through my window. Paul and I watched it, too. It was very dark outside.
"My mother called him Leon," she said.
"Last name?" I said.
She shook her head.
"Just Leon," she said. "I assume it was his first name."
I tried to get as much as I could while the faucet was on.
"Any gray in the afro?"
"No."
"Beard?"
"Mustache," she said. "A big Fu Manchu thing."
"You know what he did for a living?"
"No."
"You ever hear from him after she died?"
"No."
"You know where he is now?"
"No."
"You know anything else about him?"
"No."
"He treat you okay?"
"I didn't see much of him. My mother sort of kept him to herself."
"He didn't mistreat you," Paul said.
"No."
The rain arrived like an explosion against the window, flooding the window pane. There was some lightning and commensurate thunder.
I said, "After your mother died, you went to live with your father?"
"Yes."
"How was that?"
She shrugged. "He tried," she said. "But he wasn't much good at anything but rolling a joint. Mostly we were on welfare."
"How'd you get to be an actress?" I said.
"I always wanted to. From as long back as I can remember. I don't know why. I got in the drama club in high school, and the drama club teacher helped me get into an apprentice program at the La Jolla Playhouse and. " she spread her hands.
"So why are you so dead set on finding your mother's murderer?" I said.
"Well. I. she was my mother, for God's sake."
"And you want justice," I said.
"If I can get it," Daryl said.
"I can't promise it," I said.
"I'll settle for revenge," she said.
I looked out the window at the fully evolved thunderstorm. Blow, winds, I thought, and crack your cheeks.
23
I called Evan Malone at the number Epstein had given me and got his wife, and made an appointment to come up to his place on Bow Lake to talk with him. On the drive up Route 93, I called Epstein on the cell phone.
"Find anything in D.C. about Shaka?" I said.
"They got a file," Epstein said.
"Can you get it?"
"Classified."
"Don't you have clearance?"
"Need-to-know basis," Epstein said.
"You need to know."
"No," Epstein said. "I'd like to know. But I'm not working on a case which requires me to know it."
"And you can't work on the case because you can't get any information about it to work on it."
"That's a little oversimplified," Epstein said.
"They have no reason to classify some two-bit counterculture gunny from 1974 on a need-to-know," I said.
"Apparently, they do," Epstein said. "I'll try to spring it loose. There are some channels to go through."
"I'll bet there are," I said. "What reason would you guess."
"I don't wish to guess," Epstein said. "I'll see what I can find out."
"I'm guessing there was an informant involved."
"I don't wish to guess," Epstein said.
Malone's cabin, on Bow Lake, was alone in the woods. There were neighbors, I had passed them on the way in, but they weren't in sight from the cabin, and, as I got out of the car in the driveway, I could have been in Patagonia. An aging cocker spaniel came around the corner of the cabin and gave me a token bark before she sat with her tongue out, waiting for me to pat her. After I did, we went around to the front of the house, which faced out toward the lake. Malone and his wife were sitting on the deck, looking at the water. A pitcher of iced tea sat on a little tray table between them. We said hello, and I sat in a canvas-strapped folding deck chair. They didn't offer me any iced tea,
"I'm trying to backtrack an old killing," I said.
"Anne told me," Malone said and nodded sideways at his wife.
He didn't look good. His eyes were sort of unfocused. His face had sunk under his cheekbones, and he had the sort of thin, flabby look of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a short time. There was a lot of loose skin under his jaw.
"Emily Gordon," I said. "Killed during a holdup at a bank in Audubon Circle."
"Yeah?"
"I believe you were the lead agent on the case."
"Hard to remember," he said.
"But you know it was long enough ago to be hard to remember," I said.
Malone shook his head and didn't say anything. Malone's wife watched him all the time, as if she were afraid he might fall over without warning. She was short and plump with gray-streaked hair that used to be blond, worn in short bangs across her forehead.
"I know there was a Bureau file on the killing," I said. "But I don't seem able to access it."
Malone sipped his iced tea carefully, as if the glass were hard to hold. When he put it back on the tray table, his wife's hand moved to grab the glass if he had trouble. Neither of them said anything. The spaniel had gone to sleep with her head on Mrs. Malone's left foot.
"I wondered if you might have any recollection of what might be in the file."
Malone was slouched in the deck chair, his chin touching his sternum. He wore tan shorts and a yellow polo shirt with blue horizontal stripes, high white tube socks, and brown leather sandals. His legs were pale and thin and blue-veined.
"Mr. Malone has had some very difficult surgery," Mrs. Malone said. "He hasn't gotten his strength back yet."
"I won't be long," I said. "Anything you can tell me?"
"Nothing to tell," Malone said hoarsely. "Wrong place, wrong time. We never found the shooter."
"Did you know his name was Shaka?"
"No."
It was a splendid summer day, 75 degrees with a breeze off the lake.
"Do you know why she was in Boston?"
"Don't remember, something about a sister." There was sweat on Malone's forehead.
"Did you write a report?"
"Must have." He smiled a frightful, weak, humorless smile. "Bureau's big for reports."
"You recall any connection with Sonny Karnofsky?"
"Never heard of him."
No law enforcement guy in Boston in the past thirty years wouldn't have known about Sonny Karnofsky.
"Any kind of mob connection?"
"No." He looked at his wife. She stood at once.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Mr. Malone needs to lie down now."
I nodded. She sort of hovered around him as he got himself slowly out of the chair. He stood as if his balance were uncertain and began to walk very slowly, bent over as if his stomach were vulnerable and he wished to protect it. She was right with him, ready to catch him if he fell. Though how she thought she'd prevent him from falling, I didn't know. They reached the back door of the cabin. She opened it and put her hand under his arm and steered him through. Then she turned and looked at me.